How to build a LOW MAINTENANCE timber decking base

so folks it is finally time to start on our decking project now if you have a search around YouTube and have a look at how to install decking you'll get roughly probably at least 200 different answers as to how it should be done so as per usual please don't take my word for it this is just our take on it and obviously the first thing we need to do is clear this whole area because we've got a whole load of holes to dig so before we get started on the main kind of framework structure I just wanted to explain how we're actually going to be doing this because obviously in the main house we've got the floorboards are running in that direction and we want the outside decking boards to be running in the same direction so basically it's going to sit kind of over the top of the sill and just below the render kind of at that height there if that makes sense we've got a lot to take into account here such as the air bricks and making sure we can still get a free flow of air underneath the house we also need to cater for things like making sure that these drainage holes at the bottom of the bifolds aren't getting blocked up or obscured in any way so there's a lot to think about here so as per usual I've knocked up a quick design on SketchUp just so we can work out exactly where everything's going and I've then marked out exactly where all 12 footings need to go this is the important bit to get right because it's not easy to change once we've dug these holes and filled them with concrete now on the basis that biblical rain is forecast and I don't particularly want all of our footing holes to fill up with water what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut out the weed fabric where we need to dig the hole because we need to do that anyway and then I'm just going to leave it until this bad weather has passed I'm going a little bit bigger rather than too small and then we've got kind of a a good physical guide of we need to dig our [Music] holes so we shall wait for the rain to pass and then we will dig a whole load of holes [Music] so I've got to be honest Mrs Mark is going to do the bulk of the hall digging while I go at the gym [Music] ironically I'm back from the gym to help out but credit wear credits due Mrs Mark genuinely dug most of the Halles on this one she is the master Hall digger [Music] now while you watch me sloppily pour a load of conrete pads I want to explain a few key design decisions about our decking I've worked on enough decking over the years to know what's likely to fail and I'm hoping fingers crossed that we can get a lifespan of at least 20 years out of this first ly as per usual think maintenance we're not concreting posts in the ground since it makes them a nightmare to replace and they will fail over time every component of the decking will be screwed or bolted in place so it should be easy enough to replace anything that does fail we also designed our extension with a sufficiently big overhang that there should be no issues with water splashing beyond the DPC this is a major consideration if you want floor level decking especially on a north-facing wall like ours and also just to preempt some valid concerns that you may raise about decking we'll have no problems with rats since we have cats and they kill absolutely everything if you don't have cats then design your decking appropriately also we didn't want a stone patio since it complicates matters with the underfloor ventilation and installing it at DPC level may cause problems with overly paranoid surveyors if we ever want to sell the property Timber decking is a much easier structure to remove if if there is an issue later down the line our decking is just below 30 cm in height so doesn't need planning permission but obviously you should do your own homework as to what permissions may be required and no it won't turn into a slimy ice rink so long as it's properly maintained more about that when we cover finishes in a later episode [Music] so the pads are all in and I've started cutting all the Timbers for the main support structure just to give you a very very quick overview of the pads the main thing here is that I've made made sure that the ground level around the pads is lower than the pad itself So that obviously when it rains water doesn't start to build up on the pad so I've done that around all of the kind of central pads just dug round and then I've back filled with gravel and it just means any water can easily drain away the front pads are slightly higher than ground level anyway which you probably saw when I was making them and the back pads which I bothered to make forms for have a fall away from the house anyway so what I've now started to do is accurately Mark out exactly where the joists need to go so I've got the string line set up going down the side there so that goes exactly parallel to the house and then I've pulled that measurement down onto the top of each pad so that line there is exactly in line with the side of the house and parallel to the side of the house I've then measured from the wall of the house to the end of the deting on the corner there and then after done the same over on the other side of the decking so you can see here I've marked up the exact width so it's 6555 from the end of the house up to that point there and then I've measured from that wall over to the corner pad here and also measured from the mark that we talked about earlier across to here so that marks our outer corner and this should be perfectly Square because it is perfectly parallel to the back of the house but I will double check it for square before putting everything together just by measuring the diagonals and then to work out the height of the deck so top of the joist is going to be in line with the top of the sill here so that little black mark is the top of the joist Mark then last night while it was kind of dusk I got the laser out and I've carried that Mark to that corner and then carried it over to the fence so here and carried that all the way to that post and to that post there so basically we know that that Mark is at the height of the decking next to the house what I'm then going to do is drop down 1 cm to allow a little bit of a fall for water to flow off the edge of the decking so that water isn't flowing towards the house so coming back to my plan which is stuck on the window I've marked out all of the joist sizes and all of the accurate measurements of exactly what I need to be doing so it's now time to cut a whole load of bits of wood I did actually set things up for outdoor cutting yesterday and it was quite nice starting some of the work outside in the nice weather but it's forecast a tipit down today so I'm actually going to move everything back indoors and it actually makes life a bit easier I can set up a stop block on my bench with the chop saww and I can just do loads of repeat Cuts really really quickly without having to worry about the weather this is my first template cut that I know is exactly 2350 I'm basing all the other cuts on that so at the other end I've knocked up a little end stop and it's quite important when you do something like this I've just put a reference mark on the bench down here because this can easily get knocked you really don't want to risk cutting 20 odd joists at the wrong length and then not realizing until you got to fit them and honestly for loads of repeat Cuts Like This I have yet to find a faster way than doing on the chop saw like this with a stop block as regular viewers will know I am a little bit challenged on space in here but we'll be fine time to cut a whole load of wood I'm not going to boy you with me endlessly cutting bits of wood a couple of tips so I'm marking the crown of each board along with the cut side as I go I'll be applying wood treatment to all cut ends later on these boards are pretty straight but if there are any with a slight Bend it's always worth ensuring the center of the bend faces upwards I've also now managed to get hold of the supporting posts and roughly cut all of those to 300 mm lengths you'll see what I'll be doing with those very [Music] shortly so The Story So Far We've got three posts in exactly the right place ignore these extra posts because they're just temporarily kind of holding everything up so that when I take these ones away to cut them the whole thing doesn't kind of fall down the ledger board is bolted in at the back there and it's got that very very slight fall on it you can just see on the spirit level the bubbles just touching the right hand side of the line so that's enough of a fall just to make sure the water is going in that direction quick look at all the tools I'm going to be using by the way bitchman paint impact driver drill many many spirit levels and squares well we've got a hand saw down there but I haven't worked out how to switch it on lots and lots of clamps and we'll talk about fixings later on I've marked out on the posts exactly where they need to be cut so I'm going to do that on the band saw I appreciate not everyone has a band saw so you can do it obviously with a probably a circular saw or a hand saw but for me I've got a band saw and it's just easier [Music] so then what I'm doing I'm putting an extra coat of the bitchman paint on the bottom of the post loads of it absolutely drowning it in the stuff and then I'm just going to stick a bit of DPC membrane to the bottom of this and the idea is here or the thing that I'm hoping for is that the DPC membrane is pretty much sealed to the bottom of the post so hopefully no water can get in at the bottom there and then I'll show you what I'm going to do after that belt and braces I've quickly put in the through bolts with the point of the square pointing upwards and that just means that water is more likely to kind of run off these edges rather than just sitting on top and then as I say I know belt and braces probably a bit Overkill but I have got little squares of EPDM I'm going to pop a splodge of bitchman paint on it just to stop it from kind of moving about and that is going to go under the DPC membrane like that the theory being if it works that any water that does land on the rubber the next line of defense is the damp proof membrane which is pretty much glued to the bottom of the post with the bitchman and then we've got a good inch of bitam in here so providing the water level doesn't come higher than that and if we do we've got bigger problems then this post should be totally protected and by the way the reason I'm not painting the entire post I think sometimes you run the risk of rather than preventing moisture in Grass you actually end up trapping moisture in the wood so I'd rather leave as much of the bare treated wood as possible so that this can dry out if it does get wet and moisture isn't getting trapped inside the post this is always the hardest one to get exactly right but we are perfectly level over to that side there we've already got our fall set on the outer Ledger over that side time to build the rest of the deck structure [Music] [Laughter] [Music] let's quickly talk about the fixings I'm using we've got all of our joist hangers here and a little tip for joist hangers by the way I like to give them a bit of a squeeze together preferably with gloves on just so it grips the timber a bit otherwise it can kind of flop around a little bit these are 47 mil that I'm using and by the way freebie shout out to uh TC fixings I think I ended up using they were the only players that I'd find that had literally everything in stock absolutely brilliant service really really happy as I say not sponsored I just like to give credit where credit's do anyway we have got our structural screws for the joist hangers they nicely come with their own TS bit we've got our hex screws hex head screws again structural screws for going into the end grain of joists mainly so I don't have to use joist hangers absolutely everywhere otherwise I would need literally well I would need a lot more of those we have got our Wafer Head screws here again Torx across the board and they come with their own little Torx bit as well which is kind of nice the sunken head allows me to put these in and then put a joist directly over the top of them so that I can have joists back to back and then finally uh stainless steel deck screws that I'll be using but that'll be in a later video when I put the actual deck on so make sure hit subscribe if you want to see how I'm going to be using these and you know I'm not scrimping on the fixings there's probably a couple hundred quids worth of fixings here they're not cheap but hopefully they'll not rust and it's just another step towards a relatively maintenance free deck [Music] really quick well I've been promising to upgrade my impact driver for a while so this is a direct comparison between my old Makita DTD 146 and brand new Dewalt dcf887 this was only 80 quid or something I'm going to test it on these Timco 6.7 by 95 W for head screws I have drilled a clearance hole on this side just because I think it's best practice so we'll do the Makita first 3 2 1 not bad and then the DeWalt 3 2 1 jeez yeah it's a bit faster I guess it was worth 80 quid [Music] so here's a problem you can run into every now and then I am literally down to my last two joists and these are like absolute bananas they're really really bent in an Ideal World I would have arranged a return but this is our third delivery of Timber so far from the build this Merchant it hasn't gone very well so I haven't got any more time to mck on waiting for deliveries to arrive so all I've done is I've cast a string line along one edge of this I've got a couple of options I can either Square out the crown or the underside the crown has loads of knots in it so I'm going to leave that more towards the bottom because that'll be more tricky to cut so I'm going to cut the underside make it perfectly straight follow the string line along and at least we'll have a final straight step to finish off the decking I'm doing this in two passes cuz it's quite a lot of material to take [Music] out so this is what it was like before not sure if you can see so I'll push down on that and we'll look an that that's fully pushed down we're about an inch up on that side and this is what it's like after perfect so a slight change of plan here if you haven't guessed we're going to put an ins Step at the front here if you want to know the reasoning behind why we're doing that head over to the member zone I've made an entire video about that and uh all I'm going to do is shift this gravel board back a little bit just so there's no soil like underneath the step because this board that matches up with that board's going to have to come quite far forward worm don't go there you will die worm go in the Barrow so I don't particularly want like wet soil and grass touching the bottom of the uh step and um it'll just be a bit of a better job if we just move that gravel board back should be easy enough it's already cut it's kind of embedded in the concrete a little bit go is so again very slight fall on the step I'm not sure if you can see but the bubble is just touching the left hand line and that just gives a very slight fall imagine that would be perfectly straight so very slight fall for the water to run off the step in that direction and we're nice and level at the front as well oh [Music] [Music] wood treatment wise obviously everything is c24 pressure treated but where you've made a cut in the wood you can see the pressure treatment only goes in about a centimeter into the wood or thereabouts so you must treat all of your cut ends although do bear in mind Keith from Rag and Bone Brown's video where he did a test of various wood preservers and found that they did very little but even so I'm still treating everything anything that is close to the ground or in contact with the ground is getting bitchman paint applied to all of the cut ends every other cut end I'm just using this bartine wood preserver seems to kind of do the job but as I say do bear in mind Keith's video and I think the key thing to remember here is don't rely on the wood preserver to rescue your deting you're much better designing your deting in such a way to ensure that moist surfaces just aren't in contact with the timber not only have I applied wood preserver to every single cut end of every chist but I'm also applying wood preserver to everywhere where I've damaged the wood so for example everywhere where I've put a screw or a bolt just bear in mind that treat the Timber it's only really treated for the first what half CM or to a CM so yeah hopefully that just should help a little bit [Music] [Applause] [Music] so folks that is is more or less it for the base the only remaining job is to fit this stuff now this is expensive it's 62 a roll and I've got two rolls of it to fit and it's called deck tape and I'm going to be doing that next time when I fit the actual decking because I think it's about to Chuck it down again and what you can't do especially with tape that cost 62 of roll is wasted by fitting it on silking wed wood so if you could do me a massive favor and hit subscribe and you can come back and see part two of building this deck where I put the deck tape on fit the deck surface and build a step and finish the whole thing off but on the whole I'm really pleased with this it's very very solid I don't think there's any parts that are particularly at risk from rot but who knows this is just my Approach as per usual now just to help you out a little bit more if you want to really nerd out on the detail of deck building I've made a bunch of extra videos over on the member zone that go into things like how I worked out how much Timber would need how I worked out how many fixings would need which I didn't get entirely correct by the way because I completely forgot to account for the Noggin I've also made a one where we talk about the step in a little bit more detail and loads of SketchUp help and things like that as well because as I say I've designed the whole thing on SketchUp and hopefully from the Members Own videos you can get a bit more of an in-depth overview of how I'm using SketchUp on a project like this and on the public Channel there's going to be loads more videos explaining a few of the details of how I've done things why I've done things in certain ways so don't forget to hit subscribe and you can see all of that stuff once it comes out if you've got any questions comments stuff you would have done differently post it down below but for now folks as per usual look after one another be nice to each other we shall see you next time TTY bye [Music]

Channel: Gosforth Handyman

Views: 88,217

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Id: LVsi2DFpS8M

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2024